ulfilled on this occasion. The
house was a crush of wilting flowers, and smelt of tuberoses enough
to give one a vertigo for a month. A band of music brayed and clashed
every minute of the time; and a jam of people, in elegant dresses,
shrieked to each other above the din, and several of Lillie's former
admirers got tipsy in the supper-room. In short, nothing could be
finer; and it was agreed, on all hands, that it was "stunning."
Accounts of it, and of all the bride's dresses, presents, and even
wardrobe, went into the daily papers; and thus was the charming Lillie
Ellis made into Mrs. John Seymour.

Then followed the approved wedding journey, the programme of which had
been drawn up by Lillie herself, with _carte blanche_ from John, and
included every place where a bride's new toilets could be seen in the
most select fashionable circles. They went to Niagara and Trenton,
they went to Newport and Saratoga, to the White Mountains and
Montreal; and Mrs. John Seymour was a meteor of fashionable wonder and
delight at all these places. Her dresses and her diamonds, her hats
and her bonnets, were all wonderful to behold. The stir and excitement
that she had created as simple Miss Ellis was nothing to the stir and
excitement about Mrs. John Seymour. It was the mere grub compared with
the full-blown butterfly,--the bud compared with the rose. Wherever
she appeared, her old admirers flocked in her train. The unmarried
girls were, so to speak, nowhere. Marriage was a new lease of power
and splendor, and she revelled in it like a humming-bird in the
sunshine.

And was John equally happy? Well, to say the truth, John's head was a
little turned by the possession of this curious and manifold creature,
that fluttered and flapped her wings about the eyes and ears of his
understanding, and appeared before him every day in some new device
of the toilet, fair and fresh; smiling and bewitching, kissing and
coaxing, laughing and crying, and in all ways bewildering him, the
once sober-minded John, till he scarce knew whether he stood on his
head or his heels. He knew that this sort of rattling, scatter-brained
life must come to an end some time. He knew there was a sober, serious
life-work for him; something that must try his mind and soul and
strength, and that would, by and by, leave him neither time nor
strength to be the mere wandering _attache_ of a gay bird, whose
string he held in hand, and who now seemed to pull him hither and
th